The Uisce Éireann website, water.ie, provides valuable information about water supply, services, and delivery. In this way, the site functions as a critical resource for the Irish public and occasionally experiences sudden spikes in visitor traffic whenever Uisce Éireann announces service disruptions, outages, or potability notices. 

Given these traffic patterns, a key goal for Uisce Éireann was to implement a future-proof solution that would ensure their website was secure, scalable, and able to perform under pressure.

Having always strived to provide a rich, informative service to users, it was also important to Uisce Éireann that we migrated the components of their site’s user experience into the new solution. 

This user experience put enormous emphasis on localization, relying on geospatial data to ensure that users could easily access content related to the water supply in the area nearest their home or business. Notably, it also offered the advantage of pushing updates about water supply in a user’s immediate area.

Following a recent move to Drupal—a flexible, open-source platform ideal for Uisce Éireann’s diverse content requirements—Uisce Éireann also decided to migrate their hosting solution to continue to support traffic demands. 

Ultimately, we helped them land on Acquia Cloud, which offered a tailored solution for Drupal deployments. Even better, Acquia Cloud’s scalable infrastructure means that it automatically adjusts resources in response to changes in traffic.

In order to be fully confident in our recommendation and setup we conducted rigorous load testing that turned the dial up on traffic. Way up. 

During the simulation, we swarmed Acquia Cloud with 3.6 million visitor requests within a 20-minute window—over ten times the expected real-life peak—definitively proving that the new solution could handle whatever was thrown at it, without performance issues.

The benefits of localizing Uisce Éireann’s content experience were clear from the beginning: by combining real-time information with specific guidance, we could help Uisce Éireann create additional, tangible value to help customers navigate outages, water quality and infrastructure projects. 

To realize this value, we had to overcome the challenge of the website’s existing CMS components, which couldn’t collect the necessary data required to tailor the user experience to specific audiences.

So, we developed a tool for localizing content consisting of customized components. These components were built to integrate with Google Maps APIs, allowing a content editor to define GeoJSON formatted data representing the desired locational information. 

The data could take the form of Points (location pins), Polylines (indicating a road or river), Polygons (representing more ad-hoc areas), or any combination of the above. 

To establish a line of communication between these new components and the MongoDB database housing all of Uisce Éireann’s geo-spatial data, we developed an API hosted as a Microsoft Azure Functions App. This API provides both public- and CMS-facing endpoints, the latter designed to enable Uisce Éireann to add, edit, and delete component data in the database as needed.

By migrating the website and helping customers get the answers they need faster, the people of Ireland can get accurate, up-to-date information that is specifically relevant to them.

Rest assured, this information and the Uisce Éireann website are always available.